NY cotton up 2nd day, recovering from last week’s loss

NEW YORK, Oct 15 (Reuters) – Cotton futures in New York rose again on Monday as speculative buying helped the market rebound from a loss last week that was triggered by the bleakest U.S. government crop report on cotton in decades.

Cotton’s most actively traded contract on ICE Futures U.S., December, settled at 72.34 cents a pound, up 1.3 percent on the day. It was the second day in a row that the market was up; it finished 1 percent higher on Friday.

The two-day rise helped erase a tumble on Thursday, when the December contract fell 2 percent after the U.S. Department of Agriculture increased to a record high its 2012/13 global ending stocks forecast for cotton.

The price rebound aside, few traders were willing to revise their pessimistic outlook for cotton, saying the market had been buoyed since Friday by speculators and nothing had fundamentally changed.

“I think prices are just consolidating, getting in a range of between 70 and 73 cents,” said John Flanagan of Flanagan Trading Corp in North Carolina. “This will probably continue a little while longer but I suspect the next major move will be down.”

On Monday, December cotton traded between an intraday low of 71.09 and a high of 72.40.

At 3:20 p.m. EDT (1920 GMT), trading volumes on ICE Futures U.S. stood at around 14,700 lots, down about 20 percent from the 30-day norm, data from Thomson Reuters showed.

Thursday’s USDA report marked the third month in a row that the agency had increased its estimates for global ending stocks of cotton since the new marketing season started on Aug. 1.

The latest revision put ending stocks 14 percent higher than 2011/12’s 69.56 million bales. It was the U.S. government’s most bearish report on cotton since the 1970s, said Sharon Johnson, a cotton specialist at Knight Futures in Atlanta, Georgia. (Reporting by Barani Krishnan; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)